I'm aware of that and I respect both Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport's work. That's why I consider it the best tool available and use it myself, and why I didn't suggest I could do something "better".

On the other hand and as a matter of personal taste, I find the tool still quite arcane in structure*. "Built on top" is a word that describes a lot of concepts in TeX/LaTeX too well. And seeing the vast array of technologies that are available for perl right now (and that weren't when Knuth started to work on TeX), I do find the dream of a perl-based, modular typesetting system that is more suited to my thought process quite tempting.

*I could say the same about (Microsoft|Open)Office, by the way. Pen and paper are a very natural interface, but the abstractions chosen by either technology don't even come close.